eating healthful and delicious gluten-free, low-sugar, and vegan food

Daily Archives: October 7, 2013

One of my favorite vegan cookbooks is Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. However I have to make a lot of adjustments to those recipes to keep the cookies gluten-free and low in sugar, to be suitable for my lyme diet and other conditions. Plus I am not used to overly sweet things since going on a candida diet, and I have come to prefer my desserts less sweet and enjoying a full portion than having to feel restricted and bloated with typically sweetened desserts.

Looking through Vegan Cookies, I could not get my mind off the Ginger Macadamia Cookies. I kept thinking of ginger all week. But my husband wanted chocolate-chip cookies. These cookies met both demands.

I had an opportunity to try out NuNaturals tagatose sweetener. I used it one-for-one in another recipe and didn’t find it sweet enough, unlike xylitol which can be sweet enough, yet is often too moist. So I decided to use it to cut down the coconut sugar, as a partial sweetener. I also made several other adjustments so I felt OK calling this recipe my own. More in depth review of tagatose forthcoming as I experiment a little more.

Ginger Chocolate Chunk Cookies (gluten-free, low sugar, vegan)

ingredients:

2 cups Gluten-free all-purpose flour (I used Bob’s red mill)

3 Tablespoons almond flour

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

3/4 teaspoon ginger powder

2/3 cup canola oil

1/2 cup coconut sugar

1/3 cup tagatose (or more coconut sugar or dry sweetener of choice)

1/2 teaspoon stevia drops (I Used NuNaturals orange stevia)

1/3 cup almond milk (or any non-dairy milk)

1 tablespoon ground flax seeds

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

1 cup chopped dry roasted almonds*

1/2 cup candied ginger**, finely chopped

1 bar of extreme dark chocolate (85-88%)

Directions:

1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
2) Sift flour, baking soda, salt and nutmeg in bowl.
3) In a large bowl beat together oil, sugars, tagatose, stevia, nondairy milk, flaxseeds, and the vanilla extract.
4) Fold in the flour and mix to moisten. Before completely combined fold in the nuts, chocolate chunks, and ginger.
5) On a parchment paper or silpat lined baking sheet, roll cookies into balls and flatten slightly, placing them about 2 inches apart.
6) Bake 14 minutes.
7) Cool 5 minutes on the pan, then remove from and eat!Original recipe can be found here.

*The original recipe calls for macadamia nuts but I found them prohibitively expensive.

**I have not found a sugar-free candied ginger, but perhaps I may make my own. You could brush off the excess sugar on it to reduce the sweetness, but that and the dark chocolate are the only real sweetener in this recipe, so it’s far from a traditional sweetened cookie.